


Grounds for Vertical Schisms and Horizontal Bodies

by thewave



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Canon Related, Confessions, Dialogue Heavy, F/F, Ficlet, M/M, One Shot, Post-Canon, Tension, buckets of gayness, hints of philosophy, mostly a discussion of where and what they are post-show, sfw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 08:36:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19808650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewave/pseuds/thewave
Summary: “I’m moving away from heaven... to the left, or the right or... on the same plane... laterally... I’m moving away from heaven laterally.” Aziraphale repeated, “Not closer to hell or... Her... just, you know, to the side. Not a side.”“Um... laterally... ” Crowley considered it, not looking to argue with it, but never opposed to pointing out that it could be argued with, “but that doesn’t get us closer to earth, or to each other.”





	Grounds for Vertical Schisms and Horizontal Bodies

“You don’t know what I’m thinking.” Crowley kept flipping and flopping her hand, “I’m thinking, wine and food, we enjoy it... and now that we’re not with anybody else, well, I guess, I’m just thinking we might as well keep on enjoying, go through human things.”

Aziraphale leaned away from the path of Crowley’s hand, and from the resulting movement of everything else around it.

“We’re not human.” her emphasis was all over, as if she had only decided the end of what she had said when it had already began.

“But we’re not what we were, right?” Crowley considered, she truly had before and truly was again, “We’re human-er, and we’ve moved... ” 

“Um...” 

“At least you know what direction you’re going... ” Crowley lowered her hands to her sides, slowed and checked Aziraphale every few words, “You can certainly go down, you can always go down, but you can’t go back up...”

Aziraphale turned, “I’m- I’m not going down!” she bit at the beginning of every word in her indignation, then pushed her compromised posture back into place, even as Crowley’s angular couch fought against it, “I’m moving away from heaven... to the left, or the right or... on the same plane... laterally... I’m moving away from heaven laterally.” she repeated, “Not closer to hell or... Her... just, you know, to the side. Not a side. ”

“Um... laterally... ” Crowley considered it, not looking to argue with it, but never opposed to pointing out that it could be argued with, “but that doesn’t get us closer to earth, or to each other.”

“Because we aren’t.” Aziraphale didn’t consider it.

Crowley leaned forward and scanned her flat only to be seen doing so and encourage the same action, “Look around you, angel.”

“We just happen to align vertically in our... respective disagreements with our respective... ” she looked vacantly downward, “places.”

“So,” Crowley gave it another try, “you think we’re just the same as we were, just to the side?”

“I am only talking for myself, really, I suppose you might have… risen somewhat, you know, after all, must have.” Aziraphale looked at Crowley as if she may be saved, as if she needed it.

“Risen? What am I, a cake?” Crowley sighed and bent forward, head in hand, staring upward, “Wine, food, Into The Woods, why not other things humans enjoy?”

“Crowley.”

“You know, that doesn’t work.” Crowley hadn’t listened to how her name was used, her body reanimated and she continued to make sense, “If anybody moved, aside from laterally, it should be you. Demons don’t go up, that’s unheard of, but as an angel, there’s one way you can move and you did move.”

“I’ve not— Are you insinuating— I've not!” Aziraphale did the opposite of falling in her fervor, and then landed back down, perhaps one inch less from Crowley.

“No, no, of course not, I’m just saying, for the sake of argument, I think we can agree, demons by definition have some legroom, wingroom, as long as you don’t try to go up, which could never be our choice anyway, that would be your lot’s call. But angels, well, there’s a lot of ways to do something wrong and only one way to do it right, or at least that’s what they believe, uh,” Crowley briefly lost her sense of direction, “you know what I’m saying, angels got to be angels, but demons, we kind of just have to not be angels.”

“You’re evidently not… truly like the rest of them.”

“But that’s exactly what I’m saying, neither of us is, difference is, being a demon sort of accounts for it.”

They both sighed and looked down. 

“… Well!” Aziraphale jumped again, failed to stay up, “If it did account for it, you wouldn’t be to the side! You would still be there, but you’re not!”

“Hm...”

“I have a point!” she said as if she'd scored it. 

“You have one.” Crowley conceded, but failed to fully believe, “... Perhaps hell accounts for rebellion against it.” 

“That’s what heaven does.”

“No, you’re what _we_ rebelled against, you just hold the fort, we rebel, right?”

“You didn’t rebel against heaven.” Aziraphale pointed out, flatly.

“Didn’t I?”

“The past is in the past.”

“No, I’m talking now. Didn’t I?”

“I...” 

“I did.”

Aziraphale seemed lost for rules to remind Crowley of, and suddenly aware of the space around her, “I rebelled against heaven... ” 

“And against hell!” Crowley leaned between her and the space.

“Right,” Aziraphale looked around as if to resize the threat, “I pushed up, and down and —“ 

“I don’t think that’s a useful way to visualize it.”

“I do,” Aziraphale nodded to herself, “I’m where I was, just alone,”

Crowley attempted to sink in to the sofa, but the sofa wouldn’t have her.

“... I’m sorry, Crowley.” Aziraphale turned to her, already knowing what would be there, and she dropped her hand on Crowley’s knee, “I do know we’re in the same place, I’m still... ” she took her hand back only because it was needed in the heavens, to make a new point, ”none of them are who I thought they were, angels aren’t supposed to be… brutes, or we are, but in that case I’m not— I don’t want to be—to the side of them, even if I’m far off to the left!”

“You know,” Crowley looked for it, but still believed it, “maybe, maybe you’re the only one who got it right. ” 

Aziraphale protested as if it were flattery she was too polite to take.

“I don’t think there’s something to get right, personally, but I’m a demon,” Crowley went on, adding caveats to the flattery, “but, you know, if there was, I think you would be the one to get it. But I’m a demon.” 

“Well! You must also have gotten it right, if I have!” Aziraphale exclaimed, and took care to keep doing so, “We’re next to each other!”

They both followed the high of it and then parted, looked ahead, rolled down the steps.

“A demon isn’t supposed to get it right, is she?” Crowley broke the silence.

“Right!” Aziraphale confirmed that’s what she planned to break it with herself.

“Not your kind of right… can anything be right if it’s right for a demon?”

Aziraphale breathed in as if that air was needed, then let it out as shapeless as it had come, but less urgent. 

“You were saying” she then began again, “that there’s not a wrong way to be a demon, aside from being an angel, but you have gotten it wrong, not by Her ineffable standards, but definitely by hell’s.”

“Maybe you’re right... I’m just a demon off to the side of hell.” Crowley tried it on as a feeling and let it push her down. 

“Maybe you’re right, we’re human.” Aziraphale made room for it this time, “Human-adjecent, with a longer life and more eyes and —” 

“Maybe we’re a new thing.” Crowley’s voice went down but grew, taking on the open space at ground level.

Aziraphale turned her nose up.

“Oh, I knew you wouldn’t like that.”

Aziraphale looked to the space where the words still were, and continued to contort her face, “My head hurts.”

“Oh, good G-“

“Not literally, dear, just thought it would get across I have had it with this conversation.”

“Well, um," Crowley looked through her flat, now seeing all that wasn't in it, "can I get you, um... something?“

As Crowley returned to her, she noticed Aziraphale wasn't getting up, “Yes. And no.” she considered, “What was the conversation we were having before this one?”

Crowley hadn't thought Aziraphale was following at all, and possibly she wasn't, and this wasn't what she meant, but Crowley mean it. 

“Oh, um, I think I was in the process of, arguing, for an expansion of our human — well, not inherently human, not at all, far from that, plenty of humans who don’t care about it at all, plenty of humans who don’t drink, though, plenty of humans—“

“Yes.” Aziraphale interrupted her, smiling.

Crowley’s mouth hanged, the rest of her many words piling and running into each other, “... Yes?” her voice was half what it was before. 

“So,” Aziraphale continued, unflinching, as if she’d bought into the comparison to wine, as if she'd sold it herself, “where do they usually do it? Carpet? No, that’s the old place... bed!”

“Aren’t you...” Crowley mumbled, and then scraped the tip of her tongue of what she herself was, “worried?” she said at last as if she’d found the word lying on the ground.

“Why would I be?”

“M-might explode?” Crowley tried, she herself had worried about that, worried in the way one might worry about finding shoes that would fit ducks for when ducks take up tap dancing. 

“Oh please, I can hold your hand can’t I?” she did, she held Crowley’s hand and then held it up in the show of it, and then kept holding it as if it were just another way to be, “Hardly anything more divine. Hardly anything more occult.”


End file.
